Video Game Software Helps in Age-Related Vision Loss Research

A patent-pending medical imaging technology uses automated software and a video game to provide standardized, accurate, and precise identification of eye diseases including age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of visual impairment in the world.

BALANCED media technology in partnership with the Retina Foundation of the Southwest (RETINA) and Southern Methodist University (SMU) signed a 10-year exclusive license, development, and commercialization agreement to bring the medical imaging technology to the $35 billion AI healthcare market.

Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) - Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment & Prevention
Age related macular degeneration is a disease of the elderly, wherein the macula or the central part of the retina gets affected, leading to loss of vision.

‘Injecting the machine learning process into medical imaging can identify eye diseases more accurately.’

To assist RETINA, BALANCED created and crowd-sourced an original video game, Eye in the Sky: Defender.The game uses optical coherence tomography (OCT) retinal images embedded in the game’s environment to create human-computational image segmentation.

As players predict the path of the alien force in the game, they unknowingly learn to trace lines used to perform diagnostic measurements of OCT retinal scans and create new datasets.

When integrated with BALANCED’s HEWMEN® artificial intelligence (AI) platform, these new datasets were used by experts at RETINA and researchers at SMU to provide the information needed to train a machine learning (ML) algorithm to analyze OCT images more accurately and precisely.

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"Human and machine collaboration is the next step in machine learning and AI,” said Corey Clark, deputy director of research and assistant professor of computer science and engineering for SMU Guildhall, an assistant professor of Computer Science at SMU Lyle School of Engineering and CTO at BALANCED.

By leveraging this sophisticated level of human-in-the-loop (HITL) computational model, as well as human computational gaming (HCG), it’s now possible to use AI to quickly analyze millions of individual datasets (retinal images) to detect patterns and pathologies that would have been impossible or impractical given the scope.

Age-related Macular Degeneration Beyond Single Treatment Mode
The research report establishes that drugs targeting immune pathways to prevent retinal tissue loss in age-related macular degeneration are ineffective as monotherapies.

This technology could be a game-changer for researchers and drug manufacturers in the data analysis of disease progression, drug trials, and treatment efficacy for age-related macular degeneration, among other diseases.

With this technology we are seeing substantial improvements to image analysis, decreasing our time and cost, and seeing a significant increase in the number of images processed and associated accuracy and precision of image processing.

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Source-Medindia